Miles per oat

Just a silly thought how "efficient" my bike is, pretending I could power it by "oat meal".

Organic oatmeal cost me $0.85/lb.
http://www.calorie-count.com/calories/item/8231.html
40g of oatmeal has 146 calories.
1655 Kcal/lb

Biking 1 hour takes about 550Kcal, so 1 lb of oat meal can take me 3 hours to "burn". If I can average a brisk 16 mph, I can go 48 miles /lb of oatmeal, or about 56 miles/$1, or about 0.0177/mile.

Now a nice moped can get about 100 mpg:
http://sportsbay.com/tospmo.html

At $2.70/gallon that's about 37 miles/$1, or $0.027/mile.

So my bike is only about 2/3 as expensive per mile as a moped. Of course a moped can go up to 30mph, while that's near "sprint" speed for professional bicyclists.

Well, one more comparison, if I take the bus to work on "nonpeak hours", it costs me $1.50 for a 6 mile ride. That's about $0.25/mile or about 10 times as much as my bike energy costs.

Of course buses count other costs too (even if also subsidized as well), and I don't have to insure or maintain the bus, and I can relax and read or whatever I like.

The SIMPLE analysis says:
Bikes are the perfect ideal for medium distances - say up to a 45 minute destination, and can be considered "free" up to this point since we need exercise anyway, but obviously over longer distances, at a daily use, there's diminishing returns on the time requirements.

Overall, I'm not a great advocate for "biological power" as long as we can get renewable energy from other sources like wind and water and solar, but I'm sure sooner or later the wise people will ween themselves from fossil fuels. I don't know how we'll run things without, but I expect we'll do with less energy.